The Biggest Box-Office Bombs of 2016

There were two ways that you could make a hugely unsuccessful movie in 2016. You could make a blockbuster wannabe with a gigantic budget that makes a lot of money, but not nearly enough to put the movie in the black. Or you could make a relatively low-budget movie that does so poorly that it doesn't even make back its production budget.

In the blockbuster category, the year's biggest loser was probably Ben-Hur. The ancient-Egypt-set action film didn't draw action movie fans or the Christian audiences it was hoping to entice; it took in only $94 million worldwide on a production budget of about $100 million.

Disney's Alice Through the Looking Glass didn't do so well, either. It earned $300 million, but the combination of its $170-million production budget and its big promotion and distribution budget kept it from turning a profit. Fortunately for Disney, the $7 billion the studio earned from its other releases made Alice's failure sting a little less.

Other big-budget bombs of the year include The Finest Hours, The BFG, Gods of Egypt, and Ghostbusters.

Among the year's low-budget failures, comedies are prevalent. It was an especially bad year to be Zach Galifinakis; his two films this year, Masterminds and Keeping Up with the Joneses, were among the least profitable movies of 2016. It wasn't so great to be Sacha Baron Cohen or Andy Samberg, either; their The Brothers Grimsby and Popstar: Never Stop Stopping, respectively, were also among the year's biggest stinkers.

Also failing to do good business this year were the literary/horror spoof Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Tina Fey's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.